A bluffer's guide to mens' K1 slalom
Q: I know this one. It’s the Viking-looking carry-on where they stand up and paddle along the lake as if they’re off for a good day’s pillaging, right?
A: Nope, that’s flat-water. This is white-water. It’s the one that looks like you’re heading over Niagara Falls in a bathtub while trying to weave your way through tree branches on the way down.
Q: Sounds like a right laugh.
A: It’s not.
Q: Oh.
A: It’s incredibly tough on the body. You paddle down a 300m course while 13,000 litres of water a second gush past your ears. That’s the equivalent of 75 bathtubs of water every second. And you have to fight your way through 25 gates without touching them.
Q: How hard can that be? Surely the strength of the water will just guide you downstream?
A: Well, apart from the fact that that amount of water isn’t so much guiding you as propelling you, only the green gates are taken heading downstream. You have to take the red gates going upstream.
Q: Upstream? Through 75 bathtubs a second? You’d need to be a HGH-fed salmon to even think of it. What happens if you hit the gate?
A: You get two penalty seconds added on to your time. Miss a gate altogether and it’s 50 seconds.
Q: But hang on – surely with all that water torrenting past, the gates swing all by themselves. How can they tell if you moved it or the water?
A: They have judges who decide one way or the other. In the qualifying run on Sunday, New Zealander Mike Dawson got a two-second penalty for brushing gate five. The judge was his mother.
Q: His mother!?
A: Yep. He joked afterwards that he had been thinking of lodging an appeal but there were post-Olympics ramifications to worry about. “I like her cooking too much,” he said.
Q: Well good for him. We have a horse in this race, don’t we?
A: We do indeed. Fourth-placed man in 2008 Eoin Rheinisch. He almost retired after Beijing and has been through the wars with injury in the interim, he qualified in 12th place on Sunday. He hits the water today at 1.39pm.
Malachy Clerkin
For a full interactive animated guide to each sport go to irishtimes.com/sport
Top spoofing factoid: The Hochschnorer twins from Slovakia, Paval and Peter, are going for their fourth gold medal at successive games in the doubles tomorrow.
Do say:It's based on slalom skiing.
Don't say: It's based on salmon spawning.
When: Today from 1.30pm.
